[tlhIngan Hol] Expressing "underwear"
Will Martin
willmartin2 at mac.com
Mon Apr 29 13:05:47 PDT 2019
For myself, I consider, “When {-be’} is not negative enough, use {-Ha’}."
It’s like the difference between not understanding or misunderstanding. The latter is a more extreme negative than the former. You {yajbe’} a known unknown (you know what you don’t understand), but you {yajHa’} an unknown unknown (you think you understand what you don’t understand.)
And disassembling is more extremely negative than not assembling.
That’s just the loose guideline. Which of the two given {-Ha’} interpretations makes more sense as a more extreme negative for the verb? That’s going to be right more often than it is wrong.
There isn’t a way to always be right. Context helps a lot, but most of the time, {-Ha’} is the more extreme negative, and it applies only to the base verb, not to any of its suffixes.
charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan
rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
> On Apr 29, 2019, at 12:43 PM, nIqolay Q <niqolay0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 7:09 AM mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com <mailto:mihkoun at gmail.com>> wrote:
> SuStel:
> > I don't think the Klingon verb vuvHa' disrespect means this. I think vuv
> > refers to how someone feels about someone else, not how someone treats someone else.
>
> I always wondered, if we have the {-Ha'} on a word, which could take
> different meaning depending on whether we read the {-Ha'} as "mis-",
> "-de", or "-dis", then how would we decide which of the three was to
> be understood.
>
> Unfortunately though, I can't think of an example right now..
>
> Context.
>
> For instance, mutlhHa' could mean "disassemble, take apart" or "assemble wrongly". If I shout at my roommate torgh! yorghmey DamutlhHa'pu' jay'!, do I mean "Torg, you've taken apart the goddamn shelves!" or "Torg, you've put the goddamn shelves together wrong!"? It could go either way. In this case, you need to consider the previous and current status of the shelves.
>
> If Torg said he was going to make a minor repair to the bookshelf, and I come back to discover that the entire bookshelf has been reduced to its component pieces, then I probably mean the first one. The bookshelf was assembled, now it is not, so the "undo" meaning of -Ha' seems more likely.
>
> If Torg said he was going to put together the bookshelf he brought home from the Ikea System, and the end result has twelve screws left over and no right angles, then I probably mean the second one. The bookshelf was unassembled, now it is poorly assembled, so the "do wrongly" meaning of -Ha' seems more likely.
>
> Even if you couldn't tell which specific meaning of -Ha' I had in mind, you might still be able to provide an interpretation that could include both meanings: "Torg, you've fucked up the goddamn shelves!" And if you still can't tell, there's always nuqjatlh?
>
> If you're writing a sentence with an ambiguous -Ha' and want to make it clear, you can add another sentence afterwards, like they do in Krotmag:
> torgh! yorghmey DamutlhHa'pu' jay'! DaH 'ay'mey Doj neH bIH! Torgh, you've fucked up the goddamn shelves! Now they're just a pile of parts!
> torgh! yorghmey DamutlhHa'pu' jay'! tu'HomI'raH DachenmoHpu'! Torgh, you've fucked up the goddamn shelves! You've made something useless!
>
> (Or you could just use lagh "take apart, disassemble", which I forgot about until after I'd thought of this example.)
>
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